The Gendered Complexities of Promoting Female Entrepreneurship in the Gulf

This paper explores women’s entrepreneurial activities in the Oman and Qatar in light of the state attention given to promoting entrepreneurship in the region over the past decade. In the Gulf Arab countries, like in many rapidly developing economies, neoliberal growth discourse abounds. Along with this, the promotion of entrepreneurship and embrace of individual enterprise is paramount. Despite the dominance of the state in political and economic spaces, Gulf governments have embraced the rhetoric of the market and entrepreneurship. Drawing from semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participant observation conducted between 2011 and 2015, this paper examines this phenomenon. In a region stereotyped with weak gender development outcomes, female entrepreneurship is largely cast as a positive development aimed at liberating and empowering women through individual enterprise. In contrast, this paper finds that the same forces that are meant to empower women often reproduce or reinforce certain gender norms while introducing new forms of dependency. Gulf female entrepreneurs confront competing tensions within three intersecting political economy logics: the structural logic of the economy, the logic of development narratives, and the logic of socio-economic organisation.